Church demolition near Algiers to make room for a mosque highlights Islamism’s hypocrisy

by Kamel Abderrahmani

The building was in danger of collapse. It is yet another church demolition in Algeria. Islamists defend religious freedom in the West, but "destroy churches and synagogues wherever they have power".

Algiers (AsiaNews) – Algeria has learnt nothing from its civil war in the 1990s, a war caused by Islamists that killed more than 200,000 people in a country that continues to sink into radicalism. The political regime in place has produced and supported Islamism in order to keep people dogmatised in ignorance. Ultimately, Islamisation is a process that has never stopped. It might have slowed down, but it is still going on.

As stipulated by Article 36 of the constitution, this country guarantees freedom of conscience. This includes freedom of worship within the limits of the law, although this is not explicitly stated in the text. However, the country can also justify all of its anti-Jewish or anti-Christian acts by virtue of the same constitution, since Article 2 states that Islam is the state religion and Article 10 bans state institutions from doing anything contrary Islamic morality. These articles are completely contradictory and faithfully reflect the schizophrenic state of the country.

I say this because on 9 June the Algerian state oversaw the demolition of the Catholic church located in the centre of the city of Sidi Moussa, 25 km from Algiers, through the local People's Municipal Assembly and bulldozers. This reminded me of the destruction of the Catholic church that once in the centre of Jijel or the criminal destruction of the beautiful church in a town near Sidi Moussa, located right in its centre, replaced by a garden that resembles an elephant trough that has become a refuge for the homeless and the chronically unemployed, not to mention drug addicts. Such a scene can but seduce and provoke the jealousy of the madmen of Daesh – the Islamic state in Iraq.

Algerian authorities found a very shallow argument to justify this anti-Christian act. According to the authorities concerned, the church was listed in the red category by the technical inspection services. The legitimate question that arises from this is, since the building was deemed in danger of collapse, why was it not restored and listed as part of the national heritage? The statement of the mayor was of unprecedented clarity. He had announced the construction of a mosque and a Quranic school on the same site. Such statements caused outrage, as many saw the demolition as an act of vandalism.

Therefore, let me relate this to the freedom of worship that Muslims enjoy in the West and ask one question. If the mayor of Paris or Rome had destroyed a mosque to build a church, what would have happened? Sunni Muslims would have shouted scandal and Islamophobia!

This question shows the hypocrisy of Islamists and their double standards. They defend freedom of worship in the West in order to ban it in their homeland. They fight to build mosques in someone’s else homeland whilst destroying churches and synagogues where they have power.

What is more, in Algeria the Ministry of Religious Affairs stood idly by and this inadmissible for Algerian Christians. This is a process of Islamisation that does not dare say its name. But, as said before, the only difference between Daesh and the Sunni Muslims is that the former take action without any hypocrisy whilst the latter are passive but can take action at any moment.